The Road

The Road has been in the To Read Pile for years.  I’m a big fan of Art of Manliness, and Brett McKay reads it annually.  The AoM store even has a “Carry the Fire” zippo, which I intend to eventually treat myself to as a reward for making it through this book.  Brandon Hale, author of the Prince Martin Epic (our son’s favorite books, and frankly, some of mine) lists The Road as one of the most influential books he’s read.  Andrew Heaton, host of several of my favorite podcasts, calls it the “ultimate dystopia” and “simultaneously the most beautiful and hideous post-apocalyptic prose ever written.”

I’d been putting off reading The Road, because I knew the hideous nature of the narrative.  I get heavily invested in characters I read (I cried when Dobby died), and knowing the wringer they go through in the book has been off-putting to me.  The final straw came when Andrew Peterson in one of his recent books confirmed my suspicions that his song “Carry the Fire” was, in fact, inspired by The Road.  I decided that if a guy who often can’t make it through his own concerts without shedding tears can make it through the book, so could I.  But I wasn’t doing it during my daughter’s recent surgical adventures.

Once we got back, however, I dutifully checked the book out from the local library and dove in.  It wasn’t what I expected.

*****SPOILERS AHEAD*****

For one thing, it was short.  I expected it to be about twice as long.  And I expected more purple prose.  Instead, it’s very direct and sparse.  I really appreciated that.

But far more than that, I was surprised with how little I consciously identified with the father, especially given how much many men I respect do.  Part of it might be knowing that he dies at the end, so perhaps I kept the character at arm’s length.

Mostly, though, I think I just disagree quite strongly with the man’s choices in life.  He is a man with tunnel vision and a Malthusian outlook.  He repeatedly has chances to help others and instead concentrates on his own survival and that of his son.  Instead of treating strangers as opportunities to expand civilization, he assumes them to be threats, or at best, an extra mouth he can’t feed.

I think it’s the hypocrisy that gets me.  He tells his son that they’re carrying the fire–the values (like "don't eat people") that make up the kernel of civilization–, yet when they have chances to be civilized, they aren’t.  He claims that they’re looking for good guys, but he’s so paranoid that not only does he never take a risk to find out if some individuals are good guys, the eventual good guys who do take in his son can only do so after he dies.

That’s the great tragedy of the book.  He spends so much time making sure he survives to euthanize his son if need be, then can’t summon the resolve to do so and dies with no hope of his son’s survival or peaceful passing.  Whereas if he’d been more willing to take some risks, he could have passed in good company knowing his son had a secure future.

I’m sure I object so strongly because I have those tendencies in my own character.  I’ve spent much time in my adult life trying to cover contingencies that I’ve failed to take opportunities that could have obviated the contingencies I’ve been planning for.  It’s only been recently that I’ve finally started to plan for success in some of my endeavors.

There’s a really great example of this in the book.  One of the main problems he faces is that he starts the book with only two bullets in his revolver.  Then he uses one.  Later, he finds a bunker with food, water, and a couple boxes of .30-30 and .45 ACP rounds.  He observes that he could have potentially pried the primers out of the pistol rounds and trimmed the bullets down to the rough diameter of his revolver, but…he threw away his old casings.  He treats anything (and anyone) not immediately useful as baggage, never considering that value is often not immediately visible.

I think that sort of zero-sum, short-term thinking has become all too common in America today.  Several years ago, there was a fascinating article on the philosophy of The Walking Dead and what its popularity said about America.  The article is well worth the read, but the short version is that we’re seeing a reversal of values in the country.  The counterexample given in the article is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where John Wayne’s rough and tumble cowboy–while respected for his masculine traits that pave the way for civilization–is seen as a relic that must be supplanted by Jimmy Stewart’s civilized lawyer.  Both men are held in high regard, but it’s accepted that in order for society to flourish, the bourgeois virtues must supplant the law of the jungle (or prairie as the case maybe).  The Walking Dead, on the other hand, ridicules those bourgeois virtues as incompatible with the strength needed for survival.

Yet what does The Walking Dead existence offer?  Survival for the sake of survival is circular.  Without a telos, existence is meaningless.  And that’s the father’s dilemma in The Road.

But that doesn’t seem to be the way I hear it presented much.  I sometimes hear it presented as an example of existential philosophy, which is to say, the father, in a world in which survival is meaningless, is making his own meaning by choosing a burden to carry.  I think that works to some extent.

More often, though, I hear it presented as a father/son story about fighting to hand down values to the next generation.  I don’t think that works very well, though.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned both as a child and as a parent, it’s that kids pick up what is displayed far more than what is didacticized.  The father in The Road is telling himself that he’s teaching his son moral values, but what’s the actual lesson his son is going to learn?

And maybe a critique is exactly what McCarthy is intending.  The son certainly seems to feel bad about the times they don’t help people.  Maybe the point of the book is to ask the question,  “What good is fire if it’s lost its heat and light?”

The Survivors (Space Prison) and prediction **Spoilers**

As the Beloved and I perused the Falling Rock Café, I ran across a 1960s vintage print of Space Prison by Tom Godwin.  Interestingly, I also ran across a much newer print of it as The Survivors on the other side of the store.  The name rang a bell, though it was a week later while discussing "The Cold Equation" with friends that I remembered why I knew that name.

    I recently heard a person point out that a person born in late 1890s America saw transportation technology advance from horse and buggy to supersonic transatlantic flights and lunar landings.  Yet at the same time, their telecommunications device remained the same rotary-dial telephone service (Thanks, FCC and Ma Bell!  Way to crony!).  Meanwhile a person born in the 1990s saw the end of those transatlantic flights, while telecommunications have advanced to the point that Dick Tracy's wrist communicator is an actual thing.

    I think Space Prison is a product of that phenomenon.  But first, the plot.  Spoilers ahead.  As in, the entire book.

    Earth has gotten into an interstellar war with the Gerns, a race of aliens that are remarkably like humans, presumably due to convergent evolution.  A colony ship is a month and a half away from a new planet to settle and rebuild when they are overhauled by a Gern ship.  Lacking the weaponry to fight back, the ship's remaining officer surrenders.  The Gerns pick who they can use as slave labor and strand the rest on Ragnarok, promising to come back and pick them up to be reunited with their families.  The planet is thoroughly inhospitable with carnivorous critters, a virulent fever, and 1.5G.

    The rest of the book is how the survivors cope and plot their revenge.  It's pretty depressing.  Of the 6,000 or so initial people dropped off, over 1,000 die the first night.  When it becomes clear that the Gerns aren't coming back, the leaders decide that they have the technical skills to build their own ship, as long as they can find sufficient metal ore.

    Unfortunately, there's no metal ore within travelable distance.  They decide that their best bet is to write down all their technological lore--including all they know of Gern weapons and ships--and concentrate on building a society that will be sworn to vengeance, no matter how long it takes.

    Several generations ensue.  The population falls to as low as 250 before the surviving people are resilient to the conditions they are under.  They find iron ore, but it's insufficient for a ship.  It is sufficient to make a basic radio transmitter, but not a hypertransmitter, so they start transmitting their coordinates by basic Morse code, hoping to lure a Gern ship back to ambush and take themselves.

    Along the way, they discover and tame a species of telepathic groundhogs to serve as communications equipment.  They also manage to come to an arrangement with the carnivorous cat-wolves and more or less domesticate them. 

    Eventually, they get impatient and melt down the radio transmitter and the rest of their metals, primarily the old guns, to build a hypertransmitter.  They lure a Gern ship to the village.  The Gerns, expecting a primitive civilization, open their doors and send a small squad out.  The Ragnarokians shoot out the search lights with their crossbows, kill most of the landing party, take their guns, and storm the ship.  Then, they fly to the planet the original ship was bound for.  They take along one surviving Gern officer, who taunts them that they are so outnumbered, they will be easily killed before they can accomplish anything.

    What the Gern officer doesn't realize is that having evolved to live and work in a 1.5G environment, the Ragnarokians can disable the maneuvering safeties of their ship and pull tighter turns than the Gerns can.  The Ragnarokians quickly take another ship, and the book ends with the Gern officer realizing that his species signed its own death warrant by placing humans in a harsh environment that would make them harder.

    Now, the 1.5G thing is brilliant.  I really like how he did that and how it makes an ironic finish to the Gerns' hubris.  

    Buuuuut...

    Something like six generations have passed, and the aliens haven't had a single significant software update?  I mean, in my first 25 years, Apple went from the IIc to the iPad.  This story spans ten times that long, and the aliens' OS is still recognizable from manuals written with charcoal?  Not to mention that while modern firearms are still using the same "put boom powder behind ball" that they were 250 years ago, what really are the odds that a time traveling Revolutionary could pick up a M4 carbine and actually use it effectively while actively under fire?

    When you consider the historical context of the book, though, it makes absolute sense that a man seeing explosive (ba-dum-bum) growth in rocketry would assume that field would continue to advance at a consistent rate until interstellar travel was achieved while looking at the near-stagnant field of computers and assuming they would continue to advance merely incrementally.

    And this is why I enjoy old books, especially futuristic science fiction.  It allows you to look back at the fears and hopes people had for their technology.  Movies do this, too.  The pre-Code Frankensteins had a zombie reanimated by electricity.  In Night of the Living Dead, it's suggested that a returning probe with cosmic radiation is the culprit.  Fast forward to Resident Evil, and it's biotech.  People look at technology that's being developed and assume it's heading in a particular direction.

    And it injects a big old shot of humility into your life, as you realize that the trends people of previous generations thought were clear and inevitable turned out to be completely wrong.  

    Or at least, it should.

    In 1894, the Times predicted “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of [horse] manure.”  But along came Henry Ford.

    On the flip side, in 1954, Lewis Strauss of the AEC said, "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age."  And while some of that came true (especially the lack of famines, thanks to my hero, Norman Borlaug), the plentiful electricity that nuclear energy promised ran afoul of NIMBY.

    Even in my own life, I've seen a technology stall.  When I was a wee little X-Phile, I read a book based around Mulder and Scully taking on mutated nanobots.  It was scary because it was plausible.  But today, nanotech just means engineering macro-level materials on a molecular scale.  The chase for white-blood-cell-sized self-replicating robots to augment (or cripple) the immune system is all but over.  And I think the current freak-out over AI is going to be similar (a cynical man might suggest that it behooves researchers to fan the flames of fear to get grants and entrepreneurs to make wild claims to pump their stock prices).

    This is why real, hard science interpolates, not extrapolates.  When I have a patient result that is outside assay range, I do not simply say, "Well, it's going to be X mg/dL if I draw the curve out that far."  No, I have to dilute the specimen until the value falls inside the curve, then multiply it to get a reliable result, taking into account the significant figures so that I report it to an appropriate level of certainty.  And this is for good reason.  

    I once had a CRP  that flagged above assay range with a result of 18, which was fairly close to the upper assay limit of 15.  It should be fairly close, right?  But when I diluted it to within the assay range, the result was 12*2=24.  Quite a bit off.

    I'm not allowed to draw a 3cm line with a 2cm ruler, and anyone who does has left the bounds of hard science and has entered the domain of conjecture.  And that's fine for entertainment.  It's even fine for individuals to try to predict the future through their investments.  If a person is wrong, well, he may go broke, and maybe his business, but the damage is limited.  But agitation--or worse yet, coercion--for society at large to do things en masse--can and often does create problems far beyond what the original trend would have.

    Because the same ignorance occurs in societal predictions.  At the time of the American Revolution, the Founders were concerned that the citizenry had not the moral fiber required to build a Republic, and well they might:  in 1774, a visitor to New York noted at least 500 publicly practicing prostitutes.  Almost 3% of adults had parented at least one illegitimate child.

    And then came the Second Great Awakening.

    On the flip side, in 1940, Robert Heinlein wrote If This Goes On--, a work centered around the US's inexorable slide into theocracy.  And with the Depression bringing on a religious fervor that would see religious participation in the US peak two decades later, he had every reason to think that.

    And then came the '60s.

    The human brain is the greatest predictive machine ever made, and computer scientists still struggle to remotely compete with it.  But even it cannot truly see the future, even in large groups (as the 2016 election betting odds saga proved).  

    So if you're reading the news, or even a science journal, and find yourself fearful of the trends and implications, well, it just might be useful to read a good old scifi book.

PSA

Grassy square

Dad:  "Hi, if you're like me, you grew up loving the classic teenage detective series, and you enjoy sharing them with your kids.  But recently, my daughter expressed concern with how often Nancy spends 'blacked out'."

Camera pulls back to show outside of gothic asylum

Dad:  "That's why I was so glad to learn about the Adolescent Literary Detective Concussion Research Institute and Assisted Living Center in Bayport."

Camera cuts to lobby

FWD: "Hello, I'm Franklin W. Dixon."

CK: "And I'm Carolyn Keene. Over the years, we've chronicled the many adventures of your beloved literary detectives, and we trust that they've provided hours of quality reading."

FWD: "But today, Frank, Joe, Nancy, Biff, Ned, Chet, Bess, and the rest of the gang need your help."

CK: "While much research has been done in the sports fields on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the danger to fictional teenage detectives has been largely ignored."

FWD:  "And while we all know the dangers of concussions, even getting choked out or suffocated can cause permanent hypoxic brain injury."

CK: "And that doesn't even begin to include the number of poisonings!"

FWD:  "Indeed. And victims rarely seek prompt, definitive medical attention--even when the chronological setting allows for CT scans and MRIs."

CK:  "And all this impact on young, developing brains.  And more:  chronic chloroform exposure causes cancer and kidney disease."

FWD:  "The average teenage detective will be rendered unconscious at least twice in any three given volumes.  And with upwards of 60 books per series rehash, the sad truth is, most teenage detectives are practically vegetables by the third reboot."

CK: "Everybody complained that I dumbed Nancy down starting with the On Campus series to make her more relatable, but that was really just what happens when you take that many shots to the noggin."

Camera cuts to Nancy in a wheel chair as Ned tries to feed her porridge.

NN: "You know, I always loved Nancy, even during the off and on phase we had during the Files. I was always taking care of her in the old days."

Hand tremors, and he drops spoon.

NN: "But the simple fact is that with 46 concussions of my own, I simply can't do it all anymore."

Orderly in white coat appears to clean up and take over feeding.

NN: "That's why I'm thankful for the Adolescent Literary Detective Concussion Research Institute. Here, Nancy can get the full-time care she deserves after all her work."

Middle-aged man walks by.

NN: "Hey, Chet!"

CM: "Hey, Ned."

NN: "Here to see Frank and Joe?"

CM: "Yep."

NN: "How's your sister? I bet Joe would love to see her."

CM, stiffening: "She's dead, Ned.  She died in the Case Files."

NN:  "She did?  Oh, man..."

CM:  "Yes, Ned, I tell you this every time."

NN, crestfallen: "Oh, I'm so sorry. I forgot again."

CM: "Yeah, well, so did Dixon in the next reboot."

Camera cuts back to Dixon and Keene wearing strained smiles.

CK: "So please donate to the Adolescent Literary Detective Concussion Research Institute and Assisted Living Center today."

FWD: "And help us crack the case on degenerative neurological illness."

Jeep Ownership

Well, it only took me eight months after Theseia's return to get her running.  And approximately 30 minutes of driving to have her back in the shop.

    /sigh

    In my defense, my actual work time was limited.  Most of the time, she sat in an acquaintance's shop while I had other, more pressing tasks to do.  I worked on her when I could.  Two months were eaten up by an electrical issue that was super easy to fix once I figured out my error (note:  cylinder number does not equal firing order).

    Along the way in my troubleshooting, I noticed that the gas was truly filthy.  Even after I figured out that the failure to turn over was an electrical issue, I decided I should probably replace the fuel line and fuel sending unit anyway, just to be safe.

    I was half-right.

    Off to O'Reilly's to order a fuel sending unit.  Except they couldn't order one in-house, so there was no telling if/when they could get one.  Fortunately, my friend who helped repatriate Theseia to her new home had a brand-NIB unit for his Scrambler that he wasn't using any time soon. 

    I dropped the tank, drained it (because naturally, I had filled it before realizing the issue), removed the old unit, and washed out the tank.  I shoved my little ShopVac's hose into the corner and sucked out all the rust flakes.  Then I installed the new fuel sending unit, bolted the tank back in place, and ran new flexible fuel line to the in-line filter I had installed years ago.  Then I called it a day and washed the gas off me.

    All that was left the following trip was replacing the manifold to Y pipe gaskets, and I was ready to drive.  I had the Squirt with me, so I buckled him in and took him across the highway to our home.

    I should have quit while I was ahead.

    Instead, when the Shieldmaiden returned with the girls, I buckled them into Theseia and took them over to the shop for cleanup detail.  They had fun sweeping and playing with the kitty litter.  When we were done, I loaded them back into the jeep.

    At this point, I should probably note that "fixed the electrical issue" is a relative term.  After six years in the woods of da Yoop, the dash is one big mouse/squirrel nest, and the wires are chewed.  I'm currently hotwiring her under the hood to get her started.

    I fired her up, then closed the hood and jumped in the driver's seat.  About the time I was throwing her in gear, the engine idled down and died.

    Well, [redacted].

    I opened the hood and found what I was half expecting:  the inline fuel filter was completely plugged.  Fortunately, I had new cores for the filter, so I cleaned it up and swapped out the core.

    No dice.  There was nothing more than a tiny trickle getting through.  And a rust-colored one, at that.  Presumably, the filter in the tank is clogged.

    Fortunately, it turns out that new OEM-style gas tanks are a whopping $70 on Amazon.  So as long as I'm dropping the tank, I'll just change it out for one that's not (apparently) still shedding rust.

    But, hey, the kids have officially been introduced to how Jeep ownership works!

Flannery O'Connor

 I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

-Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller

With the exception of a four-year stint in New Hampshire, I was born and raised in Tennessee.  All told, I spent the next best thing to 30 years there.  I also spent a couple weeks in Mississippi over the years (one of which was gutting houses after Katrina, so perhaps not the greatest time to be there), and several months working in Georgia.  Despite that, I never understood the appeal of the southeastern US.

    But since this week’s book was Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find and other stories, I can now officially say...yeah, I still don’t get it.  Everything east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixson is still the armpit of America, IMHO.  I’ll stick to the plains, the Rockies, the Great Lakes (except Minnesota), or New England, thank you very much.

    Nor, frankly, do I get Flannery O’Connor.  Not on a visceral level, anyway.  And I really wanted to.  I mean, lots of my favorite authors and musicians love her works.

    Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, she reads like a South Park Goth kid moved into a Cumberland County trailer park and converted to Roman Catholicism.  I’d add “while smoking kitchen sink meth,” but all the kitchen sink meth smokers I ever had to deal with were way more upbeat.  As were most of the oxy addicts.

    Of course, I suspect I’m reading her wrong.  I think you’re supposed to buy the book and read one short story every other year.  Instead of binging them all at once because you have to return the book ASAP because it’s an interlibrary loan.  On further thought, that’s probably why I can enjoy even the more depressing Matt King and Tyler Childers songs:  they’re short and interspersed with other songs.

    Now granted, O’Connor had lupus and was therefore on steroids for much of her career.  More than likely, prednisone, which is known in our household as “[redacted] in a bottle” for its effects on the Beloved on the occasions she’s had to take it for respiratory and joint problems.  Seriously, that [redacted] will [redacted] you up in the head.

    Still, I finished half the book and found myself wanting to shop for black nail polish, mascara, and razor blades.

    I don’t deny her skills.  Her descriptions absolutely nail the human condition in general and the Southern, in particular.

    

    But while I appreciate unflinching looks at the pathologies of existence, I also appreciate hope.  As mentioned in the Chucky review, I’m a bit burned out on nihilism.  Whenever I run across it, I want to just say, “Look, if life’s really that meaningless, then why not just punch out and have done?  Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

    My favorite works are those that not only contain true evil, but plumb the depths of the motivations of the bad guys to make them understandable.  Only then can a work force the reader, listener, or viewer to confront the evil that lies within.  And I like my anti-heroes, too, because seeing a character do the right thing but for mixed reasons also forces one to examine one’s own life.

    But I also like there to be a glimmer of hope somewhere in there.  The idea that we may live in a crapsack world, but that it’s still worth living and working to improve.  That’s why I like there to be actual heroes, even if they’re side characters, because they present something to be aspired to.  As much as I like Harry Dresden, I prefer the books that have Michael Carpenter in them, as well.

    Flannery, on the other hand, never really presents any heroes. On a couple occasions, you think she might finally take pity on you and have one story with a happy ending, but instead, she consistently snatches cynicism from the jaws of optimism. She almost had me going with "Good Country People," but by that point, I was pretty well jaded.

    Of course, perhaps the reason people like her is that they contrast her works with her personal life.  Perhaps the appeal of Flannery O’Connor is that she could take those unflinching looks at human depravity and existential dread and still hang on to a hopeful lifestyle...even with her own health affliction.  She wrote and edited and lectured and worshiped despite her suffering and death sentence.

    I just wish the hopeful part came out a bit more.

Ransomware

Full-time economist and part time troll Walter Block is infamous for arguing that many things society regards as evil are, in fact, good.  Well, maybe not good, but better than the alternative, at least.  Probably the hottest of his hot-button issues was arguing for child labor as better than child prostitution.  In 1976, he wrote Defending the Undefendable and followed it up this year with Defending the Undefendable II: Freedom in All Realms.

    One of the more interesting cases made is that of blackmail.  The basic argument is that under the current system, if someone stumbles across sensitive data, they have only one legal form of profitable recourse:  publishing the data, usually through a tabloid.  As a result, the victim has no options to prevent the data from being disclosed, other than to try to kill the blackmailer.

    With legalized blackmail, however, the victim does have an--admittedly expensive--option.  He can pay off the blackmailer.  Under such a system, if the blackmailer were to disclose the material, or later demand payment in excess of the agreed upon amount, the victim would have legal recourse to sue, based on breach of contract.  Of course, going to trial would disclose the information, but if you’re suing for breach of contract, well, then the material is already disclosed, now isn’t it?

    The other salutary effect that legalizing blackmail would arguably have, especially on public figures, is to make people more cautious what behaviors they engage in.  If it’s perfectly legal to take pictures of a politician and his mistress, well, then said politician might think twice about having one.

    Maybe.

    At any rate, it’s an interesting thought experiment.

    Recently, the Colonial pipeline was shut down by a ransomware attack.  More recently, the country’s largest meat packer, JBS, has also been hit.  Both attacks have caused large-scale economic harms.

    I find this amusing, because a former employer of mine was hit by a ransomware attack.  A coworker making up the month’s schedule downloaded a free Microsoft Word template.  

    Never trust a .docx file.

    The result was that the entire system was encrypted the next morning.  I don’t know how much Bitcoin was demanded, because they didn’t pay.  The IT security guy at the time was exactly the sort of obsessive paranoid you want in an IT security guy, and had the servers backed up every 24 hours to an icebox.  As a result, he was simply able to scorched-earth the servers and reinstall everything.  There was maybe six hours of data lost.

    In my opinion, that is just basic security, and that any large infrastructure firm does not have such a plan in place is frankly guilty of malpractice.  If a tiny [redacted] on the [redacted]-end of Nowhere, MT, has an effective plan for ransomware attacks, a multi-state pipeline should, too.

    Colonial reportedly paid $11 million to the hackers to unfreeze the data, the bulk of which has been seized by the FBI.  Of course, anyone familiar with civil asset forfeiture in America knows that the FBI ain’t giving that [redacted] back.  So essentially, Colonial paid $11 million to the FBI to...do what, exactly?  Wreak vengeance on the hackers, I guess?

    Here’s the thought experiment, though:  what if we legalized ransomware attacks?  Up to a certain amount, that is.  Say, $1,000 for individuals, $10,000 for small businesses, and $100,000 for large businesses.

    Now all of a sudden, you can’t depend on the FBI chasing down the hackers and twisting their arm to give you your data back.  Now, it’s all on you to take the appropriate actions to secure your systems.

    And news flash:  it’s all on you anyway.  Sure, if you’re a large corporation whose data lock is going to cause sufficient disruption to get John Q. Public to scream, the FBI will come into the picture long enough to make themselves look like they’re doing something.  But for everyone else, you’re just not worth their time.

    The underlying assumption is that the government exists to provide a credible threat of violent reprsal against evildoers, thereby deterring their evildoing.  But if they did provide that credible threat, then why did the hackers hack?  Now, we can argue whether the threat is not credible due to incompetence, misdirection, and/or lack of resources on the FBI’s part, or that the hackers were just too insane to appreciate the credibility of the threat.  However none of that changes the fact that the threat failed to achieve its desired effect.

    With legalized hacking, however, every hacker would be constantly attacking every major business looking for any hole possible.  As a result, every company would be incentivized to take appropriate steps to secure their data.  And much like how a human’s normal flora outgrows pathogenic microbes, the small-time hackers would likely find those holes before the handful of truly malicious actors do.

    Granted, this is a top-down solution.  And like all top-down solutions, it would likely have unintended consequences.  How would small businesses who can’t afford a full-time IT staff get by?  What if a large corporation decided it was cheaper to pay a $100,000 ransom every so often rather than $250,000 a year in competent IT staff?

    Of course, this would also open the market for solutions like ransomware insurance and a bigger gig economy for IT security for small businesses.  And while $100,000 is less than $250,000, once word got out that a company had made that decision, it would quickly become a target for multiple hacks a year.  So those problems might be mitigated.  Eventually.

    A better bottom-up solution would be for companies to voluntarily offer rewards and blanket non-prosecution agreements for hackers.  I’ve watched enough DefCon videos to know that contracted red teams are usually hamstrung by their contracts against doing anything truly effective.  A blanket bounty system for anyone, on the other hand, allows the security system to be truly tested by a large body of hackers that aren’t restricted by terms.  I mean, this is basically the entire concept behind open source code for security projects like Signal.

    Again, it’s an interesting thought experiment.

    So remember, kids, get a VPN, back up your data to the cloud and an icebox, don’t open strange emails, don’t look at USB drives you find in a parking lot, and use a USB condom when you’re charging at the airport.  Because you’re on your own.

Review of Chucky

Despite having more time on my hands than just about ever, and despite a long-standing enjoyment of all things schlocky, my movie watching over the past several years has been sadly limited, mostly by budget.

    So it was with great happiness that I noted recently before turning in that Child's Play has gone free on Amazon Prime Video.  So I did what anyone in this situation would do:  got buzzed on boxed wine* and messaged commentary to my fellow horror/scifi friends.  

    IJS, if you shoot a serial killer, and he vows eternal vengeance, then starts chanting, and a bolt of lightning strikes the toy store you're in, the proper response is to blow up the building, then soak what's left in gasoline, set it on fire, then blow it all up again.

    Pretty self-explanatory.  I'm a perennial skeptic of supernatural claims, but still, when one sees something clearly supernatural, one should react accordingly.  Especially if the consequences for failing to do so could be that an immortal killer is going to have a blood feud against you.  It reminds me of a line from my recent read, The Ball and the Cross, by the always-entertaining G. K. Chesterton:

    When James Turnbull saw this he suddenly put out a hand and seemed to support himself on the strong shoulder of Madeleine Durand. Then after a moment's hesitation he put his other hand on the shoulder of MacIan. His blue eyes looked extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful. In many sceptical papers and magazines afterwards he was sadly or sternly rebuked for having abandoned the certainties of materialism. All his life up to that moment he had been most honestly certain that materialism was a fact. But he was unlike the writers in the magazines precisely in this--that he preferred a fact even to materialism.

    Besides, the toy store just got struck by supernatural lighting, and there's a killer's body inside.  You can totally cover up your Bolshevik Muppet act.

8yo [sic] rides around on the El during school hours, and no one comments?  That's some hardcore free-range childhood.

    We try to free-range our kids.  These days our two girls spend most of their days riding bike at the parks near our house.  They aren't trained not to talk to strangers, though they are trained not to go anywhere with them, nor to take anything from them.  That last part is mostly about our oldest's peanut allergy, though.

    But a 6-year-old boy rides around on the Chicago MTA all morning, on a weekday, gets off in a bad part of town, and no one thinks to maybe ask him where he's from?  Really?

    Then again, it is Chicago.

Okay, the kid gets committed for talking to the doll, and she keeps it?

    I mean, what's her plan here?  Give the doll back to the kid when he gets out of the hospital?  Let's take the naturalistic explanation that the kid is just having a psychotic break.  It was obviously associated with the doll, so maybe at least tossing it in the trash would be appropriate.  Maybe?

    Granted, if she had, the thing could have snuck up on her at its leisure and killed her in her sleep, so I guess it was a good thing she kept it close.  Friends and enemies and all that.

    Also, this kind of goes back to the first point.  The kids claims the doll is alive.  Sure, I can buy that you wouldn't normally believe that, but there were footprints of that size in the spilled flour on the counter where the friend was before falling to her death.  If you'd listened to the kid, you would have seen the flour on the doll's shoes.

    And once she's realized this, the proper response is overwhelming violence.  By approaching the doll hesitantly, she telegraphs that she knows while giving it plenty of time to come up with a plan.  Moments later, even after revealing its true nature, it plays dead (inanimate?) to get her close enough to attack.  The smart move would have been to rush it, toss it in the fire, slam the spark cage down, and torch it.  Right then and there.  To borrow another phrase from classic literature, the slave Demetrius gives his master Marcellus some excellent advice in The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas:

    "When one picks up a nettle, sir, one should not grasp it gently."

That said, cast iron ovaries on her for chasing after it.

    She does deserve mad props for chasing after the thing after it nearly kills her.

I need a trench coat.

    I've always wanted a trench coat.  Probably from watching the X-Files growing up.  There was that short phase after I watched The Boondock Saints where I wanted a pea coat.

This had to be an absolute riot to make.

    I've always wanted to do practical effects for a schlocky movie.  And also stunt work.  Sadly, the closest I've gotten is being redshirted in a novel.  /sigh

How did the couch not catch on fire?

    One of my dad's stories from his time as a USAF medic on a domestic SAC base was of an airman admitted after falling asleep on a couch with a lit cigarette.  It didn't end well.  If an ember can (and often does) light up a couch, certainly a flaming plastic doll can.  I'm gotten burning plastic stuck to my hand before.  That [redacted]'s like napalm.

    On the other hand, I suppose this was the days before CGI, so that was most likely a practical effect, and so there was a real couch that really got exposed to real flames and didn't light up.  But somehow, I can't imagine that a financially struggling single mom has the money for high-end flame retardant furniture.  Not to mention carpet.  Maybe the husband's life insurance policy was that good, but then, why is she sweating the $100 for the doll?

    Also, maybe she should have moved out of Chicago when he died.  Money goes a lot further in rural setting, and it would have prevented this whole mess.

Maybe move one's head *away* from the door the knife is randomly coming through.

    'nuff said

Just a reminder, "when you need it" is not the time to develop marksmanship.

    I mean, cut her some slack.  She has to shoot him in the heart to kill him.  The average size of an adult human heart is 5" tall by 3.5" wide, or 17.5 square inches.  If the heart is roughly proportional to overall size, then with a height of 29", Chucky's heart is 2.27x1.59" or approximately 3.59 square inches.  That's roughly half the surface area of a credit card.  And it's moving.

    But the point still stands that having some more practice in would have helped tremendously.  That or a shotgun.

    Then again, she's in Chicago.  Just knowing how to get one shot off and hitting with it is doing pretty good.  Which brings me to the next observation:

Also, it is a cautionary tale of firearm maintenance.

    The wounded detective gives her his ankle gun to go after Chucky.  She gets a round off, hitting Chucky in the leg, but the gun jams before she can fire again.  Now, obviously, the aforementioned training time would have been helpful, assuming she had spent some of it on practicing immediate action drills.  And maybe she was limp-wristing the gun.

    But I think a more likely explanation is that the detective probably didn't maintain his firearm properly.  It's his ankle gun, after all.  A small pistol that is meant to be carried often and fired seldom.  It probably hasn't been cleaned in forever.

One of those animal control nooses-on-a-stick would certainly have been handy.

    Chucky if far stronger than your average doll.  He's able to stab a kitchen knife through an interior door.  That said, when engaged in hand-to-hand combat, the protagonists repeatedly overpower him.  He does appear to still be subject to standard physics.  He's easily flung across entire rooms.  His only kills are by ambush.

    Most importantly, he does not appear to possess (ba-dum-bum) any shape shifting abilities that would allow him to lengthen his arms.  This movie would have been very short if instead of the detective, the hero was the local dog catcher.

    Or call LawDog.

I will say, I appreciate the 1980s main-characters-survive optimism.  Refreshing change from 2000s everyone-dies nihilism.

    Probably the biggest reason I gave up watching horror movies is the 21st century's obsession with "artistic" angsty endings where either everybody dies or if they don't, are subjugated into the evil they are fighting (looking at you, Midnight Meat Train).  In the 20th century--with notable exceptions like the original Night of the Living Dead--at least some of the protagonists would overcome the antagonist.  Sure, plenty of people would get killed, but there was always the final girl who would outsmart the killer and banish him.

    I think I blame Shrek.  Shrek made it cool to subvert norms, and now every film feels the need to.  Which is stupid, because that just makes a new norm.  So now, I'm looking forward to a new crop of films that subvert the subversion and once again...y'know, let the hero(es) win.  

    I just hope I don't have to wait until the 22nd century.

*Don't judge:  it's been a rough year.